Reincarnation and the human quest for self-understanding

[Talk to IIT Kharagpur students at Kharagpur, India]

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna.
So, today morning I’ll discuss on this topic of reincarnation and the human quest for self-understanding. Archaeology, to whatever extent, it is a precise science, it is significant that the oldest artefacts of human civilisation that have been found are religious artefacts. They are not just art, they are not just architecture, but it’s all religious art, religious architecture.
So, human beings, we are as the Greek thinker Plato said that we are rational animals. Rational means we want to make sense of things. And, at one level, all of science is an attempt to make sense of things.
Now, the one thing that destroys all attempts of human beings to make sense is death. Now, we take our decisions in life very beautifully. Should I take this career or should I take that career? Should I marry this person or marry that person? Should I stay in this place or stay in that place? We take the decisions of our life so very seriously.
And yet, the ultimate decision of life, about life, is just taken by factors beyond our control and almost so casually. The ultimate decision about life is whether we live or die. So, decisions within life, we take them very seriously.
But this decision about life’s continuity itself is still in one moment. Like walking along a road and some vehicle may just bump us off and that would be the end of our life. So, we might just be living a routine life and some bug, some virus comes into our body and over.
So, now death, the reality of death has been the greatest challenge to the human quest for self-understanding. And some people try to wish away death. So, Woody Allen is an American comedian and he says, it’s not that I am afraid of death.
I just don’t want to be there when it happens. No. Death is not an event that is going to happen to someone else somewhere.
It’s like say a storm comes in Bengal and we are not in Bengal at that time. We go to India, Mumbai or Delhi or somewhere else. I don’t want to be there when it happens.
It is not like that. Death is going to happen to us. It is an event which we all have to face.
And how do we do it? How do we deal with it? A normal human strategy is to almost always live in denial. Especially in a materialistic worldview, is deny the reality of death. But in a religious worldview, in a worldview that acknowledges that there is something higher to die, there are different approaches to understanding the point of life.
So, ultimate futility is if life is just this lifetime that’s all that there is to our existence, then what it means is at any moment, it’s all over and ultimately futile. To give an example of how this is ultimately futile, say, if we are, all of you are studying engineering. You study very diligently each subject, each exam, and suddenly, if the university decides arbitrarily for no reason that you will be expelled from the college.
Rusticated with no explanation and no qualification, you are just left with nothing. What is this? I am studying so much, each exam I give so seriously, each semester I try to pass well, and suddenly, for no reason, I might just be expelled. Left with nothing.
So, like that, in our life, if we consider life to be like a university education, we can be expelled from this at any moment while we are preparing for a brighter future for ourselves. So, is life ultimately futile? Or is there some more meaning to life? The materialistic world view is that matter is all that we are made of. And we are just a parcel of protoplasm that has somehow come alive by lucky accident, and we live for some time, and after death, there is nothing more.
And people say that, such sceptics, religious people, you can’t face reality. That’s why you imagine some other world. And you think there is life after death.
And you try to think of some world where you’ll be happy because you don’t have the guts to face the reality of life. Actually, it is they who don’t have the guts to face the reality and finality of death. Now, the point is, if it’s a reality, we’ll face it.
But, who has proven that it is a reality? Has anyone proven that there is nothing beyond death? Nobody has gone beyond death and come back to say that there is nothing. We say that, oh, who has gone back beyond death and said that there is a spiritual world? Okay, that’s a good thing. But then, be agnostic.
You see, we can’t know about it. Can’t say that this whole other world is simply an imagination. To say that it is an imagination, we have to have some proof to say that it is an imagination.
There is no proof like that. But, let’s look at it from two distinct perspectives. First is, say there is a small child who is born and brought up in a tribe in Africa and never born out of the vicinity of one’s village and has no technology all around.
So, never exposed to anything apart from the culture of that village. And then suddenly one day, that child says, mummy, I want a pizza. Mummy says, where did you hear about a pizza? And nobody in that environment knows about a pizza.
So now, if there is nothing in the circumstance that gave rise to that desire for a pizza, that gave rise to knowledge of the pizza, then the question will come up, where did this desire for pizza come from? Similarly, if you consider that everything around us in the world is temporal. Matter is by its very nature temporal. But all material things are temporal.
And, even huge mountains, even the giant twin towers. When I was in New York, we went by the Debris, the place where the twin towers was there. Now, if you see, it was not just the fall of the towers that was such a traumatic event for the American psyche.
It was what the towers represented. It represented security. It represented prosperity.
It represented the greatness of the great American dream. And then it came scrambling down. So, even the twin tower is not eternal.
Even giant mountains are not eternal. If nothing around us is eternal, and if nothing material is eternal, and if we ourselves are material beings, then where did we get the desire for eternal life? None of us wants to die. All of us want to live forever.
Now, most of the movies, most of the novels, they are about romance. And romance, the common thread is, achieve happily ever after. So, ever after.
So, if there is nothing that lasts ever after, where does our desire for ever after come from? If we are simply a product of matter, and matter is never eternal, so why should we have a desire for eternal life? That indicates that, so this desire is like the desire of an African child for a pizza. It should raise the question. Even if somebody argues that this is just your fantasy, this is just your imaginary longing, but okay, where did that imaginary longing come from? There is nothing in the circumstance that will give rise to that.
Actually, what gives rise to it is, it comes from our core. Around us, whether it is the body or it is the world, it is all material, it is all temporal, but we at our core are eternal. And that is why we have a desire for eternal life.
So, logically, the idea that death is the end is far less defensible because, okay, then why do we have a longing for life? Why do we have a need to search for meaning, if ultimately everything is meaningless? So, at least we can be logically open-minded. There may be a possibility that there is a life beyond this. Now, when it comes to the possibility of a life beyond this lifetime, there are broadly two schools of thought.
There is the concept of resurrection, which is there in the Abrahamic religions. Abrahamic religions are Judaism, Christianity and Islam. So, primarily Christianity and Islam, they have the concept of resurrection.
Resurrection means that we gain life again in the same body that we have. Whereas, the Dharmic conception in the Indian traditions has the concept of reincarnation. So, in the Christian understanding, after this life, if you have been faithful to God, faithful to Allah, you go to Allah or to God or to Allah or whatever in these religions.
Now, of course, they have their own particular variant beliefs. Some of them say that they will be in a state of suspended existence till the Day of Judgement. And after Judgement, we will go to the Kingdom of God.
So, the point is, for them, their understanding is only one life. We have this life and after that either we have eternal life or we have eternal damnation. But that is also a conception of life after this life.
Life or rather life beyond this life. Now, the yogic texts, the yogic texts, they give the understanding of what is reincarnation. So, Karna means flesh.
Carnation, incarnation is to come in flesh. Reincarnation is to come in flesh again. That means to come in another physical body or material body.
So, the idea of reincarnation is that the soul is going from one body to another. So, reincarnation refers to the souls coming into a body. Transmigration refers to the journey of the soul from one body to another.
In Greek God, the word they used for this was metempsychosis. Metempsychosis means that there is something to us, which they call our psyche, which goes from one body to another. So, there is a subtle difference between reincarnation and transmigration.
Reincarnation is the stage of coming into the body. Transmigration is for the journey itself. So, either way, the point is in the reincarnation centred world view, the present life is not considered to be just the beginning or the end of our life.
Before this we lived and after this also we lived. The Christians say also the soul is eternal. But actually they have redefined eternal.
Their definition of eternal is eternal means no beginning and no end. But they actually define eternal as no end. Because every time a man and a woman unite, a new soul is created.
And after the soul is created, it is going to be eternal. So, eternally the soul will go to heaven or the soul may go to hell. So, it’s like eternity is infinity.
But you know infinity is this. So, you just take off one or half of infinity. And their idea is half infinity.
Eternal means from now till the rest of existence. This is not a very logically sound idea because the soul is whatever it is at this stage. If you are just looking on logical perspective, what the soul is is very unclear from the Biblical texts or even the Islamic texts.
There the word soul is often used in a generic sense to refer to it is used in a metaphorical sense to refer to our non-material essence. There is some non-material side to us. We are not just our physical bodies.
Whatever that is, that is called a soul. But the Bhagavad Gita, the soul is analysed as a concrete higher dimensional engine. It is not just a metaphorical reference.
It’s a real thing. So, now Please go ahead. So, I was talking about resurrection and reincarnation.
These are two options. Now, how do we know which is true? Now, I will talk about as we move forward. So, what are we trying to do now? The materialistic, we are basically going to compare three worldviews.
We will do materialistic worldview, then the resurrection worldview and the reincarnation worldview. And our analysis is for the quest for self-understanding which helps us to understand our life in the most meaningful and fruitful way. Let’s move forward.
So, now I will start first with the scientific approach and then I will move on towards a more towards a logical approach. That may not depend on scientific evidence, but we look at logic. So, now the scientific approach basically has two aspects.
There is observation and there is theory. So, now if you discussed earlier, there are certain things which cannot be subjected to controlled experiment. Like I told about most of you were there for the first class when I talked about the torch of science, how when it looks down it shows clearly enough but when it looks straight ahead it becomes unclear.
Look up, it doesn’t show at all. So, the scientific approach has its limitations in studying something which is not controllable. So, we cannot really control if a soul dies where the soul is going to be reborn.
So, we can’t subject it to controlled experiments. So, the approach that will be used in science, there are various approaches. Remember I talked about inductive and abductive.
Inductive approach is that we do repeated experiments and then we come to a conclusion. So, there is a repeated observation based on that there is a postulation of a theory and then after that there are repeated experiments and based on those experiments we come to a conclusion. This is right or this is wrong.
This is an approach that cannot be used for origins. So, we cannot make life come again. The origin of life cannot be replicated.
Life is already existing. The universe cannot be replicated again. So, the approach that is used over there is the inference to the best explanation, the abductive method.
So, we look at the evidence and then we look at what is the best explanation for this evidence. So, before we move to the evidence, let’s first look simply at the theory that is there any reason for a person who is scientifically minded to even consider the idea of a soul? Yes, there is because scientists have found that consciousness is irreducible. That means when we try to explain consciousness in materialistic terms it just doesn’t work because consciousness, the science magazine on its 125th anniversary they published a special edition where they talked about a number of questions which science has not found answers to.
The first question was where did the universe come from? And second question was where does consciousness come from? Now, why is the idea of where does consciousness come from such a complicated idea? Say for example, now here there is this brown liquid. Now, when I see this brown liquid, what exactly is happening? Now, the signals, the visual data is going to my eyes. From the eyes, it goes into the optic nerve.
Through the optic nerve, it goes to the visual area of the brain. And then what happens? What happens after that? So, now, if say somebody thinks, what is this? This looks like something like say lemon water. Now, lemon water, it tastes good.
I am thirsty, I would like to have it. So, I can have all these experiences. There are several problems with thinking that all those experiences happen in the brain.
Say for example, now if a bird flies by, say a parrot flies by. Now, researches have found that actually there are different areas of the brain which deal with different functions. So, for example, shape is discerned by one area.
The motion is discerned by another area. Colour is discerned by another area. And then, on top of that, say if the bird is singing, if the parrot is singing, the sound is discerned by another area of the brain.
Now, all these are different areas of the brain which receive this data. But we get an integrated image. Oh, there is a parrot flying by.
Now, where does the integration of all the data coming into the brain happen? There is no one area of the brain that is connected to all other areas. And even if it were connected, ultimately what is that area of the brain? That is also just basically a set of neuronal cells connected through the synapses to other neuronal cells. So, there are three questions.
Where does the integration happen? Who is the perceiver of the experience? All of the brain is ultimately made of cells. And the cells themselves are just like the cells in the body. The cells in the body, they don’t have in themselves consciousness.
So, where is consciousness present? Where is consciousness experienced? So, basically say, I see some image on a TV or on a computer monitor. So, now first of all, where is the computer monitor sort of thing in the brain? Because I am seeing an integrated image. Now, integrated image means sometimes some people make some home-made videos.
And they record the video and they record the audio somewhere else and they integrate the two. If the two are not integrated properly, they say there is a fight going on. And then one person beats the other person.
And even before that other person is beaten, the first person falls down. Bum! The sound comes, but before that the person has fallen down. So, what happened is integration is not proper.
So, now, for us, there is seamless integration. So, which is the, what is the medium where integration happens? And beyond that, what is the agent where we perceive things? These are all questions which science has no answer. T. H. Huxley was was a prominent evolutionist.
He was called as Darwin’s bulldog. He propagated Darwinism very aggressively. But even he said, and this is his own statement today, he said that the idea that some signals flowing through some cells will produce consciousness is no more believable than the idea that Aladdin rubbed a lamp and a jinn appeared over it.
There is just no correlation. It’s completely lost. There is another scientist Bill Bryson, he said that actually about the only thing we know about consciousness is that it has got something to do with the brain instead of something to do with the food.
But where it comes from, it’s not known at all. So, this is a whole different subject. I am not going to go into that.
But maybe we can have separate class on consciousness itself. But here the point is that there is empirical reason to consider, there is theoretical reason to consider that consciousness is not materially explainable. Now, what are the evidences if you want to observe something? There are near-death experiences and there are past life memories.
Now, near-death experiences what they mean one, that a person is living and person comes near death and the person sees oneself from outside the body and then they come back to the body and they tell, oh I saw this, I saw that, I went here, I went there. Now, what this indicates is that this consciousness can exist separate from the body. So, near-death experiences simply point to the possibility of life continuing beyond bodily life.
So, near-death experiences can be used to substantiate resurrection and near-death experiences can also be used to substantiate reincarnation. They can be used for both ways. They just prove that life exists beyond this body.
Past life memories, however, what they mean is, say there is a person a, there is a small child and the child tells his mummy, mummy, mummy, I want to go to my other mummy. What? Child says, I was big then, I am small now. Normally, I was small then, I am big now.
So, when people speak like this, past life memories, if past life memories were true, we will investigate whether they are, then what they would imply is not just that consciousness or life exists beyond the body but also that the centre of life, consciousness, goes from one body to another body. So, past life memories can substantiate the existence of reincarnation. So, let’s see what is the evidence available for past life memories.
We will focus on past life memories. Go ahead. Now, Dr. Jan Stevenson was the pioneer of research in past life memories and he observed four levels of evidences.
The first is recollections. As I said, the child would remember, you know, I was living there, I did this, I did that and there was my friend, there was my brother, there was my mother, like that. Recollections.
That is the first level. Second level is recognitions. When the child is taken there to the place where they lived in the past or when the people from the past come here, the child recognises.
Oh, you are my mother, you are my father, you are this, you are that. Not only recognitions, beyond that there are behaviours. That means, if this person was a middle-aged person who died and is reborn now, that person will actually treat people from the previous life based on the relationship from that life, not this life.
So, behaviour means, it has many aspects to it. Somebody has drowned by, died because of drowning. In this life, they have hydrophobia.
Very fearful of water. So, there are behaviours which move forward from one life to another. And then there is birthmarks and birth defects.
In many cases, when the children, when people, when children claim to remember their past lives, they have birthmarks or birth defects whose location correlates with the location of fatal wounds from the previous life. So, let us look at these one by one. Go ahead.
So, there are many books written by Rokhiyan Stevenson. This was his first. This was among his first.
That was his last. So, 20 Cases of Suggestive Reincarnation, that is how he started his research. And the last book is a multi-volume to more than several thousands of pages where reincarnation and biology intersect.
So, Stevenson actually spent almost more than 5 decades travelling all the inhabited continents researching cases of past life memories. And let us look at one particular case to understand the level of the evidence that he has found. Then, I look at what while analysing that case, we look at what alternative explanations could be there.
Let us move ahead. So, this is an example of birthmark or a birth defect. What has happened is, this child was born with a leg like this.
Now, this is not just some scar or some pimple or something like that. It is a very distinctive birthmark. And what they found was that this child claimed to be someone in his previous life who was run over by a truck.
And that is how he died. The truck ran over that leg. So, this is very distinctive birthmarks or birth defects that correlate with previous life’s wounds.
Go ahead. So, now, let us take this case of Naseeb Ullatashkiran. He was born in Adana in Turkey.
when he was a small child, about 4 or 5, he started saying that my name is Naseeb. He said, yes, your name is Naseeb. He said, no, my name is Naseeb Budhak.
No, no, you are not Naseeb Budhak. You are Naseeb Ullatashkiran. He said, no, I am Naseeb Budhak.
And then he started saying that I actually live in Mersin. Mersin is another place, about 80 kilometres away. He said, I want to move there.
A small 6 year old boy, he said that you know, I have a wife, I have children. And he would tell his mother, my wife is more beautiful than you. And then he insisted.
Now, his parents, Turkey is a Muslim country, his parents did not believe in this at all. So, then they neglected him. But, year after year after year, he kept insisting, I want to go there.
Then, eventually, when he passed the age of 10, he told his parents, if you don’t take me there, I am going to go there alone. The parents became a little alarmed. Then his mother took him to her father, who lived in a village near Mersin.
And he had got married. And he had married a woman who had lived in Mersin. And when Naseeb went there, he immediately recognised her and said, you are so and so.
And he started talking with her about Naseeb Gurdak. Now, she confirmed, yes, there was a person named Naseeb Gurdak who had lived there and who had been killed in a knife attack. Now, when Naseeb’s grandfather heard this, he said, let us go to Mersin.
He went to Mersin. Now, Naseeb actually had various, he had six birth marks on his body. I will come to that.
But when Naseeb was taken there, now Naseeb Gurdak’s wife, his widow, she was living in the same house. And he was just a small ten-year-old boy and unlike western culture, Islamic culture is very conservative. That is, in some way it is more conservative than Indian culture also.
And he had this small boy, he ran up to that woman and he started treating her as if she was his wife. And they started identifying so many things about her, this, that, that, you know, we did this, we went here, we did that. And then among the most significant statement that he said is that this Naseeb was a short-tempered person.
He would drink and he would get angry. So, at one time, he had an angry argument he had with his wife. So, he had picked up a knife and had tried to attack her.
Now, she had dodged but the knife had scarred her thigh. So, he told that there is a knife scar on her thigh. So, Dr. Stevenson, he got one of his female assistants to take Naseeb’s wife to a private place.
And there she showed and she actually had a scar at the same location where Naseeb had said, the scar will be there. And she said, the scar was, I got it when my husband, my ex-husband attacked me with a knife. Now, this is, you know, there is a scar on a private part of a body of a woman whom he has never met before.
How is he going to come to know of it? But this itself was a very significant finding. But more than that, go ahead, he had children who were actually now older than him. But he was so affectionate to the parents, you know, they ruffle the hair of the children and hug them.
And also he treated these kids who were older than him like they were his kids. Not only that, now his widow, she had remarried after his death. And when he saw her photo with her new husband, he was so angry.
He took that photo and wanted to tear it apart. He says, you are my wife, not anyone else’s wife. Now, how this for a child who is just little over 10, how will he take all these emotions? So, as I said that there is there is recollections, there is recognitions, there are behaviours.
And the most significant is birthmarks. So, what is the whole thing about birthmarks? That Naseeb said that he had been, whenever he would speak about his past life, whenever he said, he had been stabbed. And he had six birthmarks on his body in different parts.
He says, this was where I was stabbed. So, now, Naseeb, as I said, he used to drink a lot, Naseeb Buddha. And one time he had got into altercation with someone.
And that person was also drunk. And as their altercation became violent, that person stabbed him, stabbed him repeatedly. And Naseeb was rushed to the hospital, but he succumbed to his injuries.
So, now, the six birthmarks correlated precisely. Now, Stevenson decided to do an objective study to find out how precise was the correlation. So, like we may divide a plane into x-y coordinates.
So, like that, he divided the body into 160 squares, a grid. And then now, so, if I have a wound here, now, if say somebody else had a wound somewhere else, the probability of I getting the wound at the same location as somebody else, if the body is divided into 160 squares, then the probability will be 1 by 160. So, now, Naseeb had not one, but six correlating birthmarks.
The probability of that is 1 by 160 raised to the power of 6. It is an extremely low probability. And then we see that as something which is in addition to everything else, recollections, the recognitions, the behaviours, and is extremely strong case. Now, if you consider what alternative exclusion could be there? Now, could he have guessed everything, just imagined and guessed? How would he guess that a woman would have a scar on her thigh? Even if he guessed it all, how would he fake the emotions which he exhibited, which he expressed towards Naseeb’s wife and children? Even if he faked it somehow, how would he fake birthmarks? At all, how do you fake birthmarks and not to the precise location, not just birthmarks, but the precise locations? Now, scientifically, birthmarks have two main causes.
One is genetic. So, in some families, generation after generation, people have some birthmarks. The second is what happens during pregnancy.
If during pregnancy, the mother falls sick or because of some disease, because of some disease in her, the skin of the child that she is carrying gets scarred. The other is the mother ingests some substances. If she smokes, if she drinks, if she takes some substances which go into her system, they scar the child.
There are two main causes. Now, scientists have found that in 50% of the cases of birthmarks, none of these factors are present. There is nothing that the mother did wrong during pregnancy and there is no genetic issue.
Still, the kids have birthmarks. Where do they come from? So, if we look at all these converging lines of evidence, the best explanation for them is that it is from a previous life. So, from the spiritual perspective, the explanation is that there is the soul, there is the mind and there is the body.
So, when we go from one life to another, it’s not only the soul that goes. The soul goes along with the mind. And when a person dies, especially if people die sudden, violent or painful deaths, then what happens is the mind doesn’t get the time to process.
Process them. What happened? It doesn’t get time to process. And that’s why when the soul goes into another body, the mind is still caught in the previous body.
And that’s how some people, not everyone remembers the past life because in normal courses, a new life is a new opportunity. So, we start a new journey with a new set of with a new body and a new set of circumstances. But in some cases, when death happens violently, then the person is not able to process the memories.
And that’s how those memories stay on. So, if any of you travel over long distances, the time zones change. Say for example, if somebody comes from America to India, then they have something called jet lag.
Jet lag means that the body is biologically still in America. Body’s clock is still in America, whereas the body is physically in India. So, when India it is night time, it is day time in America.
So, the body doesn’t feel like sleeping. So, it takes some time to recover from the jet lag. So, like that, the soul has a consciousness lag.
You know, the soul is going from one body to another, but the consciousness lags on the previous body. And that’s why some souls remember the past lives. And further, how do these birthmarks come about? That actually, when somebody gets a fatal wound, it’s not just the body that gets wounded.
It’s the mind. I was stabbed. I was stabbed.
I was stabbed. That thought is, that causes such a horror. I was shot.
I was stabbed. Whatever it is. That causes such a horror in the mind that creates an impression.
And then the soul enters into a new body. Because of that impression in the mind, a physical impression manifests at that place in the body. So, this is the explanatory potential of the of the Gita’s model of the self.
But actually, the evidence for past life memories, how else would you explain it? So, one explanation, as I said, from the soul’s perspective. Another explanation could be that actions, whole thing is a fraud. It’s a fraud orchestrated by the subjects and the researchers all combined together.
Let’s consider this possibly. Go ahead. So, now the question comes up, if they, the parents, the kids obviously can’t do the fraud.
They are just 4, 5, 6 years old when they start speaking these things. They are too small. That is one of the main reasons why Stevenson focused on kids.
Now, they may want money. But Stevenson and all the researchers following him have adopted a standard policy that they will not pay anything to the subjects for interviewing them. Because they know it.
Once money comes into the picture, the people involved may sensationalise the case more. Then the case becomes more attractive and they will pay us more. And many of these families, they are actually quite poor.
Especially in India, in Sri Lanka, some countries in the Middle East where oil is there, they are prosperous. But other countries are quite poor. So, now for them, if you consider, if you actually look at these books, the way Stevenson conducts the interviews, sometimes the same questions are asked in different ways to different people and by different people.
It’s not one researcher alone, 2-3 researchers come and ask. Because this whole day of interviews happens on that day. And these people have to actually use their days earnings, just so that they can do the interviews.
So, they are getting no money, they are actually using money right. Somebody may say that, they may get some fame. No, my son is a reincarnation of so and so.
So, now, there are cases of celebrity reincarnations. There are at least 11 girls who claim to be the reincarnations of Marilyn Monroe. You know, in such cases, there is a very transparent motive for fame.
And serious research, there are some researchers who just take these cases. You may find some books, who was Amitabh Bachchan in his previous life, who was this person in his previous life, who was Jawaharlal Nehru here and there. Now, those cases are just, there are, in every field, there are people who do things seriously and there are people who do things just for getting name and fame.
So, there are some researchers who do that. But serious research like this, by default, they are suspicious of any celebrity reincarnations. As soon as you claim that you are a celebrity in the previous life, you get famed by that.
So, most of the, almost all the children and students interviewed and other researchers after the interview, they lived ordinary lives. Little known or unknown lives. They lived and died and they are reborn.
So, there is absolutely no fame involved in proving that their child is a reincarnation of somebody. Now, what about religious belief? Now, some children may, some parents may want to prove to the world, yes, reincarnation is true. My belief is correct.
Now, actually, many of the cases, like the case of Naseer, they are parents who did not believe in reincarnation. They did not accept the case because of their belief. They accepted the case in spite of their belief.
Because of the evidence. But even among people who believe, among Hindus, especially among rural, poor Hindus, there is a notion that if a child remembers the past life, that means that child will die soon. Why is the reason for this belief? See, they already accepted.
We all reincarnated. So, yes, my child was somebody in his previous life. They are not particularly curious who he was.
But their idea is that if the child is remembering a past life, that means that soul has not properly integrated into this world. And if the soul is not properly integrated in this body, that means the soul will leave the body. So, therefore, many of these parents they actively discourage their children from remembering past lives.
Even if they say, yes, it may be true, but they neglect it. They don’t elicit the memories further. So, there is no religious motive.
In fact, they have there is no religious motive involved for making a fraud like this. Going ahead. Now, actually, even on a motive, there is a counter motive.
Sometimes, what is the counter motive? Sometimes, the children behave in extremely, in ways that are extremely embarrassing for their parents. For example, there was this case of one boy in North India, he just beards him. When he was around three, one day he said, I am a member of the Brahmin family.
I will not eat the food cooked in this low caste house. His parents were shocked. What are you saying? He said, I am a Brahmin.
I cannot eat this food. And for the next four years, not one day, two days, their own son refused to eat food in their house. And the father had to, for the next four years, pay a Brahmin to make three meals for his son, cook it at his house and get it here.
Now, how embarrassing is it for parents that their own son refuses to eat food cooked in their own house? First of all, if at all they have to fake it, how do you get a child who is three years old, say, I will not eat this? How do you get a child to understand also the concept that this is a low caste, that is high caste and food should not be taken from here to there? There is absolutely nothing that the children of parents are gaining. In fact, they are gaining only embarrassment. So, in fact, the parents are not committing a fraud at all.
There may be fraud involved in a few cases, but there are many cases where there is absolutely no reason for the allegation of fraud. Now, what about the investigators themselves? Investigators may be committing a fraud. Yes, so Tom Schroeder was the editor of the Washington Post.
And when he read about Stevenson’s cases, at that time, he decided to himself journalistically investigate. So, he travelled with Stevenson for one year. He came to India and went to Lebanon.
So, when it was Stevenson who investigated the cases, he was there first. Seeing what was happening, some sceptics were saying maybe the researchers, they prom the subjects, you speak this, you speak this. But, he said, he observed all of it.
So, neither the either he said that Stevenson was critical in his approach. He was not a sensationalistic. And his default position was to doubt the case.
And as far as the parents, he said not only Stevenson did not prompt anything, he said even the parents did not prompt. The parents, it’s just an objective fact, they just told it. There was no eagerness that he saw about them for publicising it.
So, he wrote a book called Old Souls. He was a sceptic. He did not accept reincarnation.
And even after going through this journey, with Stevenson, he did not accept reincarnation. But he just said that there is no explanation for this. So, he was open to the explanation for reincarnation, but he did not accept it.
His scepticism means that he was not out there with any agenda, he was just investigating. And he wrote a book called Old Souls. Old Souls.
Souls will come from a previous life to a new life. And that book describes his investigative journey. And when Stevenson passed away, at that time, in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, they devoted a whole issue to Stevenson and his pioneering contribution to science, especially in the form of past life events.
And in that, Mr. Schroeder wrote an article as a tribute to Stevenson. And there he said, neither self-delusion, international fraud, peer pressure, nor coincidence could explain how the children he had investigated could have known all that they knew about strangers who had died before they were born. There is just no explanation.
So, there is no explanation at the material level. The most logical, the most reasonable explanation is what the children offered themselves. That is, actually they had lived before and they have come here.
Go ahead. So, as I said, if you consider from the scientific perspective, a person living and dying at one place, a child being born and brought up in another place. They are two non-intersecting sets.
So, what is the intersection? At a material level, there is no intersection. The intersection has to be something non-material. And that is the non-material soul.
So, if we look at reincarnation from this perspective, we see that there is strong scientific evidence. And this scientific evidence can actually help us to move towards thorough to a strong conviction. Now, if you want to exactly understand what the soul is, how it reincarnates, that is there in that is described in the Vedic texts.
I have written a book, Demystifying Reincarnation, from which I have spoken most of the things here. So, the important thing is that how does reincarnation come to now? The topic was reincarnation and the human search for self-understanding. So, how does reincarnation help us to make sense of life, make sense of our own existence? We understand that actually we are on a progressive journey.
On this journey, we all are at different stages in our spiritual evolution. So, whatever stage we are at present, in our next life, we move onwards from there. Life is not meant for ultimate frustration at the time of death because death is not a terminator, it is simply a transition.
And whatever spiritual consciousness we have acquired in this life, that will move onwards to our next life. And from there we keep progressing. Ultimately, reincarnation’s purpose is redirection.
The purpose of reincarnation is to inspire redirection within us. Redirection of what? Of our heart, of our longing for love. We are all looking for pleasure, we are all looking for love.
And in different species, in different bodies, we choose different objects to love. We are meant to love the eternal. When we learn to love the eternal, then we will attain eternal life, infinite eternal satisfaction.
And through each lifetime that we are going, we are growing towards that destination. We should be growing towards that destination. As we evolve our consciousness, as we start perceiving that everything around us is temporary but I want something lasting.
And therefore, let me seek that lasting. So, reincarnation changes our vision of life. So, materialism means life is just an infestation.
Resurrection means life is largely a matter of luck. If you are lucky enough to come to know about Jesus or Mohammed and if you become saved by them, then you will go back. But if not, you are doomed.
This seems to be very arbitrary by some people. Some people, if they are born and brought up in a place where they never heard about Jesus, that means they live and they die and they never got a chance to do anything. You see, it’s pretty unfair.
But we understand reincarnation means we are going through many many lifetimes and we get many many chances and each chance that we take we move forward. The ultimate purpose of reincarnation is to stop reincarnation. Stop coming back into this world to attain liberation, to attain eternal life, to attain eternal love for Krishna and to attain His spiritual kingdom where life and love eternally exist.
So, to summarise what I spoke today about, reincarnation and the human search for self-understanding. So, we all take our life very seriously. But, within our life we take decisions seriously, but the decision about life itself, one bank or a bank can handle.
It’s like a student studies very seriously in college and arbitrarily a student didn’t expect it. It doesn’t make any sense. So, some atheists may say that Oh, actually there is nothing more than this life.
We are just sentimentally longing for something. Well, if it is merely imaginative sentiment longing, what’s the proof of that? So, conversely, we see that everything around us is temporary and yet we have a desire to live. That desire has not come from our circumstances, it has come from our code.
As extraordinary as an African child who has never heard of a pizza suddenly desires a pizza. So, now, if there is life beyond this life, the possibility can be resurrection where there is only one life. Beyond this life, it can be eternal heaven or eternal hell or there can be many life forms.
Now, we discussed about the irreducibility of consciousness, how in the brain, where the integration happens and who is actually the agent of perceiving, who is the perceiver. That is something which the materialistic world can’t explain. So, from the theoretical perspective, that we can be open to some other source of consciousness apart from the brain.
As far as the evidence is concerned, near the experiences suggest that consciousness can exist separate from the body and past life has suggested that consciousness can move from one body to another. In past life, we discussed four levels of evidences. Recollections, recognitions, behaviours and birth marks.
And this was the case of Nassir in Tazkiran and how he knew about a scar on a private part of his previous life’s wife and how he exhibited affection towards his children, jealousy towards his wife’s husband and also he had six total birth marks. Extremely low probability of that. And then there was a conclusion we discussed about how could this whole thing be a fraud? There is no motive in terms of money or fame or religious vindication for the parents and for the researchers also.
Their methods were investigated by others and there is no… the most logical explanation is the explanation offered by children themselves. They are souls and they have gone from one body to another. And reincarnation gives us a vision of life as a progression.
That wherever we are in this life, the more we learn the lesson of directing our love towards the eternal, the more we progress towards the eternal. And ultimately, reincarnation succeeds in ending reincarnation and taking us to the realm of eternity. Thank you very much.
Hare Krishna. Being frustrated by temporariness or temporary nature of everything, someone concocted the idea of something permanent. It may be possible being frustrated by temporariness so they have concocted the idea.
One question at a time. So, being frustrated by temporariness, somebody may have concocted the idea of reincarnation, of life eternal. Yes, that’s possible.
See, psychoanalysing people’s motives for proposing something does not in any way prove the reality or unreality of that thing. Now, for example, atheists say that religion is a crutch for the weak-minded. Those who don’t have the courage to face life, they resort to religion.
Well, if somebody is making a particular argument, that argument’s strength should be discussed on its own merits. Once you start psychoanalysing, psychoanalysing can be a two-edged sword. We can say atheism is a crutch for those who don’t want to be accountable for their actions.
So, psychoanalysis can cut both ways. So, same way we could say that those people who are frustrated by the thought that they will have to account for their actions in the next life, they have come up with the idea that there is a thing after this life. So, psychoanalysis doesn’t lead to anything conclusive.
At a superficial level, it may seem that it is excluding things away, but rather we can look at people’s motives, why they are speaking something. But when an argument is going on, this is actually called, in logic, an ad hominem argument. Ad hominem argument means that instead of countering the argument, we attack the character of the arguer.
We attack the intelligence of the arguer. So, this is considered a cheap shot. It is considered like hitting below the line.
So, but then we can also hit below the line. So, psychoanalysis doesn’t prove anything. It can go this way or that way also.
How we can tangibly explain that consciousness, what is consciousness? How can we tangibly explain what is consciousness? Consciousness is basically the capacity to be aware. Aware of our own existence and aware of others’ existence. So, some people say there is no such thing as consciousness.
Yes, that’s possible, but even the denial of consciousness is an acknowledgement of consciousness. Because it won’t say that I don’t exist. Because even to say that I don’t exist, you have to exist and have consciousness and say something.
So, actually consciousness is the foundation of all knowledge. If we did not have consciousness, we could not know anything. All science is possible because scientists are conscious.
Because we are all conscious. So, there are certain realities which are foundational for functioning in this world. So, consciousness is a given.
If consciousness had not been there, then no knowledge would be possible. And even the denial of consciousness would not be possible. Suppose if I say I don’t know even one word of English.
I have already spoken seven words. This sentence is a self-contradiction. Similarly, to say that I don’t have consciousness.
You have to have consciousness to say that you don’t have consciousness. So, consciousness is an undeniable fundamental reality that enables us to become aware of all the realities. To say that consciousness is an illusion requires someone who is under illusion.
See, there is a very important difference over here. Say like a mirage is an illusion. Now, the object can be an illusion.
The subject can’t be an illusion. Getting the difference? See, the mirage may be an illusion. But, there has to be someone who is under illusion.
And that person has to be real. If I am seeing water where there is no water, the water has to be there. Water may not be there.
Both are possible. But somebody has to be there who sees the water where it is not there or water where it is there. So, the object of perception can be an illusion.
But the subject of perception cannot be an illusion. So, if you say consciousness is an illusion, we have to ask, who is illusion? Whose illusion is it? Somebody has to be there. Who is perceiving it or not? And that person has to be conscious.
So, consciousness is a fundamental reality of life. Which is what enables us to acquire any kind of knowledge, make any kind of assertion. I have a question about birth marks.
So, like other three things, recollection, consciousness and behaviour, they may be related somehow to our soul and mind. But, isn’t it something physical? So, how does it get transmitted from body to body? How do birth marks get transmitted from body to body? Yes, it is physical. But, the physical and the psychological are correlated.
That is one of the major findings of psychology in the last century. There is a whole genre of psychosomatic diseases. That, you know, people were stressed, people were disturbed.
Physically, they have no reason for having heart palpitations. They have no reason for any disease. But, because their mind is disturbed, the mind leads to the disturbance in the mind leads to disturbance in the body.
Not just disturbance, but diseases manifesting in the body. That’s psychosomatic disease. That’s not a negative point of view.
From the positive perspective, there is placebo effect. Sometimes, the patient is sick and the doctor just gives them sugar pills. The patient thinks that I am getting medicines and the patient gets cured.
Now, placebo effect is enduring. So many people have found it all over the world. So, now, what is happening? The mind thinks that I am getting cured, I am being treated.
It activates the body’s healing mechanism and physical changes happen. So, psychological and physical are related. And, one of his contemporary scientists, Dittakarma Prabhu, he has written a book called Human Evolution.
In that, he quotes from many papers. There is a chapter called Paranormal Modification of Biological Form. So, biological form, it can be modified, say, if somebody gets a scratch, somebody gets a fracture, one way to modify it.
Paranormal means, by psychological impressions, the form gets modified. So, there are many well documented cases in established medical journals of this phenomenon happening. So, in this case, the soul and the mind go from one body to another.
The mind is impressed. Mind is petrified. The mind is horrified.
I was shot. I was stabbed. That impression is there.
That impression causes a physical transformation in the next body. And that’s how the birthmark appears on the child. So, it is already there when the child is born.
The impression on the soul, the impression on the mind, gets impressed on the body. Theory of Relativity of Persistence We see that in our day to day life, our consciousness level, subconscious level, for example, when we sleep, what does this really signify? Why did you specify that? So, our consciousness goes up and down at different times, say, in the day, or sleeping. So, what does irreducibility of consciousness mean? See, when we are talking about reducibility or irreducibility, it’s not in terms of level of consciousness.
It’s in terms of nature of consciousness. See, reduction, say, if I have 100 rupees and I spend 50 rupees, I have 50 rupees left. That is reduction in quantity.
But reductionism is an ideology. The ideology of reductionism holds that things can be reduced down to their components. Now, at a physical level, that’s fine.
If I have a computer, my computer is not working. Then, okay, which part of the computer is not working? The computer is a functional combination of its parts which make the whole. But in the case of many things, such as our body, in a dead body also, all the parts are there.
And if you consider just a few moments after the event of death, all the body parts are capable of functioning, but they are not functioning. So, we are not just a combination of our physical parts. So, reductionism means that the human being can be reduced to their bodily parts.
This reductionism is different from reduction. So, when we talk about reductionism as applied to consciousness, what it means is that consciousness can be reduced to interaction of brain cells and brain chemicals. So, that is wrong because this is the changes in brain cells, they have a relationship with consciousness.
But that relationship is a correlation, not causation. Correlation means for example, if I am happy, I am happy, I am in love, I am smiling. Happiness correlates with laughing or smiling.
But the two are not equivalent. If somebody gets a face twisting machine and twists my face, make it into a smile. My face may be twisted into a smile, but am I happy? No.
So, happiness is not reducible to a smile on the face. A smile on the face can be correlated with happiness. So, happiness is not just this.
So, when we talk about irreducibility of consciousness, what we are saying is that the brain is the tool through which consciousness manifests. It’s the tool and that’s why whenever there is some change in consciousness, there will be a corresponding change in the brain chemicals. So, if I am angry, a particular part of the brain will be activated.
If I am feeling calm, if I am meditating, another part of the brain will be activated. But just the activation of the brain alone is not consciousness. Dr. Milter Penfield did a famous experiment in his book called The Mystery of the Mind.
He had a subject raise his hand. When the subject raised the hand, he asked him, what happened? He said, I raised my hand. And then he observed a particular area of the brain connected to the motor nervous system.
He said that part had got activated. He said, put your hand down. He put his hand down.
The hand went down and then he found that part had become deactivated. Then he, through external probes, activated that part of the brain. And the hand went down.
What happened? He said, my hand went down. Did you raise your hand? No, I didn’t. You did.
Then he deactivated that part of the brain. The hand fell down. What happened? He said, my hand went down.
Did you put your hand down? No, I didn’t. You did. So now, what this means is that Dr. Milter Penfield, he is Canada’s Nobel Laureate neurosurgeon.
Canada’s one of the greatest scientists. So he did researches like this for almost 40 years. And then he concluded that actually in the first case, it was, so the brain and the hand are one unit.
So in the first, in the second case, the brain and hand unit, they were activated by Dr. Penfield. He activated the probe. In the first case, who activated it? The brain is simply an instrument.
Say if I have a print button on my computer and the printing hand starts moving. Now say you come and press the print button. It will get activated.
I press the print button, it will get activated. So the activation of the brain part is like the print button. But who pressed the print button in the first case? So he concluded that after almost 40 years of brain study, he concluded that the brain is like a computer but it is programmed from something outside of itself.
John Eccles was another Nobel Laureate neuroscientist and he said that the source of consciousness is extra-cellular. That’s what we mean by irreversibility of consciousness. Some scientists say that the body will be 7 years old.
But many major scientists say that yes the body may change but the mind, the neurones stay for the moment. The body changes but the brain cells don’t change. Brain cells also change.
That’s been the latest finding in science. It’s published in Science Journal. In my book I quote this.
It actually shook the foundations of science. Because the whole idea is that we have stable memories. But brain cells are changing.
How do our memories stay stable? It shook the foundation. Until now, scientists have not got any solid explanation for it. But it’s well documented that brain cells also die and are reborn.
So the problem comes because of that. Say now, if somebody has written a question on this paper. Now, if say by a process we start replacing all the molecules that make up this paper.
And one by one by one, all the molecules are replaced. Every single one. And then, on the paper that is formed thereafter, the message is still there.
What happened? How did the message come there? The molecules are replaced. The message should not be there. So like that, all the cells that comprise the brain change.
But still the brain has enduring memories. Where do the memories come from? That is a profound mystery. So actually our memories are stored not just in the brain.
Our memories are stored in the mind. And, it’s like say, I have a paper on which the message is there. But from that, the message is stamped on to some other stamping machine.
And even if the paper changes, the stamping machine impresses it on the paper. That’s how. It is the mind that is the locus of the memories.
And the brain is the tool for the memories. Go ahead. But in living system of the brain, there is the existence of the memory cells and there is the element of anger or hate or happiness.
So, consciousness is basically the integration system of the brain. Consciousness is? Integration of all of these. We are handling the situation.
We are very much anger or something. And we behave in a particular manner. So, hypothalamus… I got the question now.
See, the hypothalamus and other parts of the brain, they are what process, they are what are activated when we have different emotions. They are the tools. They are not the source.
Just like when I am speaking. I am speaking at that time. My voice box is active.
My tongue is active. But they are tools of speech. They are not the source of speech.
There is a difference between a tool and a source. So, the brain is a vital tool for thinking, for processing. So, naturally, whenever any emotions happen, whenever any speech comes, the voice box will be involved.
Whenever any sight happens, the eyes will be involved. That’s an important tool that we have. Similarly, whenever any emotion, processing of emotional information happens, the brain will be involved.
But the question here is that the brain cells are, as far as ontology, as far as their nature of existence are concerned, they are non-different from the cells in any other part of the body. And they are just more complex in terms of correlation, organisation. But brain cells are essentially simply material elements.
And material elements in and of themselves actually don’t have consciousness. Electricity going through a wire does not produce any emotions. Electricity going through the brain, it does not produce any emotions.
So, these are tools. And most strikingly, there’s Dr. John Lorber, who wrote an article in Nature magazine, and the title of the article was, Is Your Brain Really Necessary? While he was writing the article, he found that there are dozens and dozens of people who had cerebral spinal fluid not around their brain, but instead of their brain. They had no brain substance at all.
And still they function normally. This was John Lorber from the University of Sheffield in UK, and there itself he had a mathematics postgraduate with a very high IQ. And once they did a brain scan, and they found there was nothing inside of it.
And it lived a full life normally and it went on to live a full life. So, this was published, as I said, not in any ordinary place in population. Science and Nature, both these places.
So, now some scientists have explained away by saying that actually there’s redundancy in the brain. If one part of the brain gets damaged, you can function the other part of the brain. But there are cases where people had less than 1% of the normal brain.
And for them to be able to function normally, that means 99% of the brain is redundant. Which would be absurd to say. So, evolution, scientists accept the theory of evolution.
Evolution means that whatever is essential for us, that’s what we’ll take. We’ll take it from the reductionist perspective over here. So, from their own theory’s perspective, if there’s a brain which is 99% excessive baggage, then reduction, natural selection would have cut down the brain.
But the fact is that we have a brain and the brain is the tool for consciousness. So, the brain is not the the brain is not the source of consciousness. The two are very different things.
That the source is what experiences. In structural philosophy, this is called the hard problem of consciousness. The soft problem is, which part of the brain is correlated with emotion? Which part of the brain is correlated with which information processing function? But, the hard problem is that why is there a conscious experience at all? Who is it that is having conscious experience? All that is happening in the brain is certain states of certain chemicals are changing in certain sense.
But does the change of chemical states in the brain cell, why should that lead to the experience of emotions? So, if you just change the chemicals in a bottle from here to there, that won’t lead to any emotions. So, why are there emotions present at all? Why is there consciousness present at all? That is what is the irreducible aspect of consciousness. The correlation is something which my more and more research will find more and more details about.
Which part of the brain correlates with which function? But the question is that all this could happen entirely without any consciousness at all. But why is there consciousness? Where is the consciousness present? The brain is simply chemicals, cells processing some of the electrochemical signals. That does not lead to conscious experience anywhere else.
In a chemical laboratory, in electric wire, in a machine, in gadget. So, where does the conscious experience come? That comes from a source of consciousness that is exposed. Sir, how do you take the case of a disease like epilepsy? I got your question.
I got your question. So, say the brain is damaged, then the person can’t function. So, in epilepsy, say the brain is damaged and the person functioning goes on.
Yes, that’s true. The brain is a tool. As a tool, say if my throat gets damaged, now I am not able to speak.
That does not mean that my speaking capacity came from the throat. I might still be able to write or if some other gadget is somehow put, then I might be able to circumvent my capacity. So, just because a particular physical damage to a particular part of the body removes certain functional capacity does not mean necessarily that that functional capacity originates from that part.
So, William James is considered the father of one of the pioneering scientists, pioneering figures in psychology and he said that the brain is not the origin of consciousness. It is the transmitter of consciousness. It’s like if I have a prism.
Now, the prism refracts light in seven colours. If the prism is damaged, then we won’t have seven colours coming over there. We may have only a few colours.
So, now if somebody has observed this prism was here, there are seven colours. Prism got damaged, now there are only seven colours. That person may conclude that this prism is originating from those seven colours.
Is that wrong? So, consciousness is definitely channelled through the brain and that’s why brain damage will cause functional impediments. But that does not prove that consciousness originates from the brain. The value of positivity, delta and energy of mental is properly processed by the brain in different form of potentials and it is thought as consciousness.
Just like the concept of energy, the brain limbic system or hypothalamus or optical system, it sees the image of particular frequency and it perceives it as an image or a sound or a vibration because brain has some primitive functions and modern functions like vibration is a primitive function and consciousness is a modern function so we are evolving from what we say, from the primitive to the modern function. So, after thousands of years, we will also have another function within consciousness. We will know how to very very very something that all the brain that is changing the form of energy to a different way.
The brain is simply processing energies and somehow processing of energy leads to the experience of consciousness. As far as theories are concerned, we all can propose different things. The important thing is that consciousness is categorically different from everything else that we know.
We talk about energy, sometimes we use the word consciousness as the energy of the soul but when we talk about energy, energy is an instant shift. For example, if I throw a ball at the water, there is a lot of energy within the ball that is being thrown but the energy itself is not conscious. It is just a force which causes motion.
So, in materialistic science or mechanistic science, there are two entities. There is matter and there is force or energy and the interaction of these two is what shapes events in the world but whether it is matter or whether it is energy, neither of them have consciousness. They are interchangeable as E is equal to MC squared but essentially neither has consciousness.
So, I will give a simple example to illustrate this that many of the functions that we human beings do, they can be done by computers also. So, now as far as the information processing capacity is concerned, the computers in some ways can not only equate but exceed what we know. Now, when a computer does this, say there was a landmark event in artificial intelligence development was, say the computer Deep Blue defeated Gary and Kasparov or similar events like that which have happened recently also.
Now, in this case, when Kasparov was defeated, he was all over the world in the newspapers showing his photo on the head and hands. What happened? A computer defeated him. And now the makers of Deep Blue were delighted.
We made a computer, he defeated his champion. But what was Deep Blue’s experience? Deep Blue did not experience anything. So, now there is neural circuitry in the brain, there is digital circuitry in the computer.
The digital circuitry did the same kind of processing as far as information processing is concerned which the neural circuitry did. Some details vary, but in essence, the digital circuitry could do the same processing which the neural circuitry did. And the neural circuitry in the future may be able to do it better.
But, the digital circuitry does not experience any emotions. Deep Blue had no emotions at all. Deep Blue didn’t even know that I was playing chess.
It was just going through a mathematical algorithm. See, the computers, when they have phenomenal processing capacities, we may forget what they do essentially. The computers began with many generations ago, abacus.
Abacus basically means you move numbers up and down. So, even when we search on Google and some data comes up, even when the computer does a phenomenal calculation, all that the computer is doing is changing states from 0 to 1. It changes the states from 0 to 1 at incredibly high speed. And that’s why such complex results come.
But the point is that the information processing can well be done without any emotions involved. That’s what the brain does. That’s what the computer digital circuitry does.
Now the brain circuitry does something similar. But, we have emotions. We have, we experience ourselves doing something, we experience ourselves feeling something because of doing something.
The computer does the same thing that we do, but it doesn’t experience itself doing something. It doesn’t experience any emotions with respect to that. So, basically there is a categorical difference between information and its processing and the experience of the information and its processing.
So, who is the experiencer? You know, if, say, I write a message and give it to you. And you read it. Say, I’ve written on the message.
You are a fool. You get angry. How do you call me a fool? Now, actually speaking, what is it? It’s simply white paper on which there are some black patterns.
Now, the paper is not angry. And I say, you are a fool. That pattern is there on the paper, but the paper is not angry.
The paper, somebody has to perceive that and that’s where anger is felt. So, just as there are ink patterns on the paper, similarly, there are electrochemical patterns on the paper in the brain, on the neural cells in the brain. But those electrochemical patterns need to be read by someone.
And when they are read by someone, then they mean something. And then some emotion is experienced. So, what science is finding is the language of the brain.
It’s like there is a physical language. So, what does this physical mean? If I know the language, then if you know the language, you understand what I have written. So, like that, scientists are finding out the language in which the brain codes information.
But who is the reader of that language? That is just as the paper is not the experiencer of the anger. When the message comes, you are a fool. Similarly, the brain is not the experiencer of the anger.
The experiencer is someone different. And that is, as John Eccles said, it’s extracellular. It’s outside the brain.
That, the Bhagavad Gita tells, is the mind within the soul. What is the difference between soul and consciousness? Consciousness is like the energy of the soul that radiates outwards from the soul. yatha prakashetheka kusnam lokam imam ravi kshetram kshetritatha kusnam prakasheti bhavata In 35.33.34, the Bhagavad Gita Krishna says that it’s the sun situated at one place radiates its light to various places.
Like that, the soul situated at one place radiates its energy outwards in terms of consciousness. So, consciousness is one of the features of the soul. chit-ananda which is eternal, conscious and blissful.
So, chit-consciousness that is one of the faculties of the soul. Sir, can you talk one-to-one, sir? Can we talk one-to-one a little later? You know, I think we need a more technical discussion which we can have later. Anybody else? Just a minute.
Just one minute. In some fiction movies, they have shown that robots have emotions. Can we train artificial intelligence to express emotions? See, there is science fiction which is ultimately fiction.
So, now, there is a difference between quantitative progress and qualitative progress. Quantitative progress means in terms of information processing. So, in the past, you know, computer would be as big as a room.
Now, you can have a computer which is there in the watch. So, in terms of quantity, there has been phenomenal progress. It is there.
But in terms of quality, in terms of understanding the nature of reality, as far as things are concerned, there are researchers who have written books called The End of Physics. There is another science author who wrote a book called From Certainty to Uncertainty. The progress of science from the start of the 20th century to the end of the 20th century.
There is certainty, but there is uncertainty. So, actually, scientific progress is not taking us closer to understanding consciousness itself. What it is taking us closer is to correlating consciousness.
So, now, when robots are shown as having emotions, that is simply programming done by people who have emotions and they are projected. The robots, ultimately, instead of looking at appearances, look at substance. The robot may have a human form.
The robot may have a human-like face. The face may also show various changes which reflect emotions. But ultimately, what is a robot doing? It is simply processing numbers.
And processing numbers has got nothing to do with emotions. There has to be someone who is processing the numbers and is experiencing the result of processing the numbers. So, the experiencer of consciousness is, it may be different from science fiction to be a robot, but in terms of reality, there has to be a conscious being who is experiencing that.
And that cannot be a number processing machine. That has to be a reader of that number processing who understands what it means and who feels something in relationship with that. Let me know till what time we should go.
So, is the soul 1,000th tip of a hair situated in the region of the heart? So, what about plants which do not have a heart? There are two different things here. The soul is 1,000th tip of a hair. Now, there is, in this particular measure, there is both a combination of precision and imprecision.
Now, 1,000th is a precise measure. But tip of a hair, how do you define a tip of a hair? Is it this much? Or is it this much? So, it is imprecise. So, the measure is indicative.
It is not discrete. The point is, the soul is extremely small. It is extremely small.
And why can’t it be seen by a microscope? Because the soul is non-material. The microscope, the invisibility of the soul is not because of its size. It is because of its nature.
Non-material cannot be seen with matter. Just as, say, the eyes cannot perceive sound. Or a black and white camera can’t perceive colour.
The apparatus is not suited for the observation. Now, as far as the heart is concerned, the soul is not situated in the heart. It is situated in the region of the heart.
And why in the region of the heart? According to Samkhya, which is a system of analysis of matter, which is something like Vedic physics you could say, there it is described that there are five different kinds of air which go in the body. Prana, Pana, Jnana, Samana and Udana. And the resultant, if you consider these five airs to be like vectors, these five vectors, the resultant of these is zero.
It’s neutral at a particular point, which usually falls in the region of the heart. That is where the soul is situated. So now in different bodies, wherever that balance is there, that’s where the soul is situated.
So it doesn’t have to be in the region of the heart, if there is no such thing as a heart in a particular creature. Is conservation of materiality correct or not? Correct means? One thing that material energy is under the control study, we can measure. So it is a material thing.
And according to Bhagavad Gita, the material thing can’t be conserved. It has to be destroyed. So, scientists say that material energy is conserved, it is never destroyed.
Whereas, Bhagavad Gita says that material things don’t endure. There is a difference over here. Bhagavad Gita also says, matter is eternal.
The forms of matter are eternal. And what causes us frustration is, we are not attracted to matter. We are attracted to forms.
Americans, they are proud of the twin tower. The material that they made, the twin tower was made of, that still existed after the twin tower fell down. But they had no attraction to that.
So, our frustration happens because we are attracted to material forms. Material forms are temporary. But matter itself is enduring.
It changes from one form to another. So, the conservation of energy is a scientific, is a principle in physics. And it’s perfectly compatible with the Vedic understanding that matter itself endures, but material things, material forms, material objects, they are temporary.
Soul is small compared to water? Compared to? When you say the soul is small, what is the reference point for comparing it to say that it is small? See, the soul is non-material. But that does not mean it is non-literal. Non-literal means that it doesn’t literally exist.
It’s just a metaphorical way of putting something. The soul is metaphysical. It is not metaphorical.
Metaphysical means it exists at a reality higher than physical. Metaphorical means it’s just a symbolic representation of something. No, it’s not like that.
The soul is real. And in the real ontological sense, the soul has dimensions. So, as compared to the body that it animates, the soul is very small.
So, one of the verses 2.28 in the Bhagavad Gita says that it’s amazing, It’s amazing that a giant elephant or a huge blue whale, such a huge body, it’s all animated by a tiny soul. So, the soul, when we say it’s tiny, it is compared to the size of the bodies it occupies. And often, the souls will be extremely small in size and need to have the energy to animate that body also.
So, the soul has its own life, has its own literal existence. And in terms of size, it is very small as compared to the body. Prabhu, please prove on the fact that life has a purpose and it is making our soul elusive enough to reach the supreme soul.
Come again, what proves? Please prove on the fact that life has a purpose and it is making our soul elusive enough to reach the supreme soul. What are the first words? Please, what are the first words? Brief. Brief.
Brief. Okay. So, how can we prove that life has a purpose and that the soul is moving towards Krishna, that is the ultimate purpose? When we come to the question of proof, we have to understand what proof means.
When we consider proof in terms of mathematical proof, there is no mathematical proof that even you exist. There is mathematical proof that your heart exists, your intestine exists, your brain exists. But you as a conscious centre of awareness, there is no mathematical proof that you exist.
So, when we talk about proof, say, if a boy and a girl wanted to have a relationship and the girl demands proof, you love me. What proof can you give? You cannot have the same kind of proof, say, if somebody says the time is 8 o’clock. No, you are bluffing.
No, I can show you the watch. No, you have sent the watch. This is another watch.
But what the time is, it is an objective entity which there are ways in which you can prove it. So, the same way to prove what is the right time and to prove whether someone loves us, they are two different categories of existence. That is why they require different categories of proof.
So, when it comes to subtle things such as the purpose of life, there are various ways in which we can infer towards that. The inference is firstly that we all are uniquely purposeful. Even if you see standing grass, it grows towards the sun.
Plants in their thick forest, they go towards the place where they can get some more sunlight or more nutrition. So, basically animals, non-human species, their purpose is to fulfil their bodily needs. Food, sleep, sex and strength, self-protection.
So, they are uniquely purposeful for that. Now, we human beings are also purposeful. We also seek food, sleep, sex, power.
But beyond that, we seek something more in our lives. As I gave the example, when Newton saw the fruit falling, if he had been simply seeking food, he would have eaten the fruit and gone on his way. But, he was looking for something more.
What made this fruit fall? He was looking for meaning. He was trying to make sense of things. So, we see all advancement of knowledge.
It is basically an attempt of human beings to look for a purpose. So, Einstein said that all arts, religions and sciences are fruits of the same tree. Same tree.
It’s a different fruit. When we try to explain the natural origin of the natural phenomena, natural causes, that leads to sciences. When we try to make sense of the world by recreating it through various artistic media, that leads to arts.
And when we try to seek answers to questions about meaning and purpose, questions beyond the physical, that’s where religion comes in. So, basically when it comes to the meaning and purpose of life, how do I know that a particular thing has this purpose? Two things. If I start using my computer as a device for playing music, start pressing the keys and try to play a music example, the sound will not work that way.
So, basically, if you want to know whether something is meant for a particular thing, there are two ways to know. First is, we try to look at the manual which describes what it is. And we try to act according to the manual.
So, whenever anything is there, whether any explanation, what is this computer meant for? It is meant for writing, it is meant for communicating. Does the explanation make sense? And does the explanation work? So, what is the purpose of our life? We all will have our specific subjective purposes. I want to be an engineer, I want to go to America, I want to get a high-paying job, whatever it is.
These are all subjective, short-term or medium-term purposes that we have. But does life itself have an objective purpose? How do we know that? We hear the scriptural wisdom and see whether it makes sense. And after that, whether it works.
It works means, whether it makes our life more harmonious, more fulfilling, more uplifting. So, that way, when we apply it to the student, reasonable faith means that it is sensible and it is verifiable. It makes sense and it helps us to it helps us find meaning.
So, A, I am in a particular office and I am into the work of software engineering. If I start doing somebody else’s work, I will push her out. I don’t know this.
I sit and do my work, I will find that things are harmonious. So, when we play the part of the part, the horn fills the hole in the heart. We are parts of Krishna.
When we play the part of the part, when we serve Krishna, what happens? The hole, W-H-O-E hole, fills the hole, H-O-E hole, in the heart. That means, we feel a profound sense of meaning, of fulfilment, of joy. And that sense of fulfilment, that is the confirmatory test for us to understand that life’s purpose is to learn to love and serve Krishna.
Thank you very much. Sri Prabhupada Ki Gaura Bhakta Vrindaki